St. Laurent Centre Quantifies Social Media's Power To Drive Real-World Traffic

June 2014 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Adam Blair, contributing editor

An impressive 30% conversion rate for a 2013 back-to-school contest gave St. Laurent Centre its own prize: a detailed demonstration of social media’s impact on sales.

The executives of St. Laurent Centre, a 180-retailer super-regional mall in Ottawa, Canada, were already convinced that social media is an essential ingredient in their advertising, promotion, and community engagement efforts. But the mall’s marketing department sought more specifics. They wanted to be able to measure and demonstrate social media’s actual impact in driving foot traffic and in-store sales.

The 866,938-square-foot mall moved closer to this goal with the debut of a social media analytics solution that ties digital campaigns to real-world customer visits. St. Laurent Centre piloted the application with a 2013 back-to-school contest, offering consumers the opportunity to win a laptop via trackable links they could access on their mobile phones. The contest was promoted via digital channels only. To enter, consumers had to visit the mall to get a code that changed daily during the two-week contest.

“We got 869 clicks to our contest landing page and 263 people came into the mall to enter the code, so there was a 30 percent conversion rate,” reports Bernice Rachkowski, marketing director, St. Laurent Centre. The contest also provided a halo effect, raising the mall’s profile and keeping it top-of-mind among shoppers engaged with the Centre’s social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, and its own website.

Even more importantly, the Source Metrics analytics solution provided a wealth of information about how shoppers engage with the mall’s digital platforms. For example, Rachkowski learned the most popular sources for shoppers clicking the contest link (the Centre’s website was the leader, followed by Facebook).“It also shows a number of detailed metrics, such as the time of day that people clicked,” says Rachkowski. “This has helped us fine-tune variables such as when we post new content, and overall it gives us a better picture of which assets provide the most bang for our buck.”

The solution provides a number of quantitative metrics, such as total number of in-store conversions and revenue of redeemed items, with reporting of metrics by campaign, social media type, and individual retailer/store. In addition to tracking contests requiring in-store (or in-mall) visits, Source Metrics’ solution also can manage discounts and giveaways. For example, with “flock to lock,” the first 10, 15, or however many people in the store receive the offer. Other examples include geographically limited offers and email acquisition contests that require an in-store visit to collect an email address.

More Efficient Social Media Measurements
Prior to the 2013 pilot program, the methods the St. Laurent Centre marketing department used to measure the impact of social media promotions were less accurate and more labor-intensive. “We love to communicate and offer promotions to our customers, but with over 11 million visitors per year, it has been challenging to track in-store results,” says Rachkowski. Although marketers had used Facebook Insights and other social media analysis tools since 2009, it was still difficult for them to show a particular retailer whether social media was actually a factor driving traffic or increasing sales. Previously, the marketing staff would spend time talking to a retailer’s store staff, trying to determine the impact of a campaign — processes that Rachkowski says were not only time-consuming but unscientific.

“For the marketing department of a shopping center, our overriding goal is to drive sales and traffic,” she notes. “To have a tool that can show ROI and direct measurement without us having to do the old ‘phone call and drop-by’ means more credible results for us. It allows us to show what we have achieved.”

Moving Dollars Into Digital
The stakes for accurate social media impact measurement are high and are getting higher. “Digital is where we’re shifting our marketing and advertising dollars overall, and this data will help us fine-tune our marketing strategy,” says Rachkowski. “We need to be able to link our social media properties into everything we do, so knowing things such as what will draw customers from our secondary and tertiary markets is very advantageous for us. We have a lot of U.S.-based retailers coming into the Canadian market, particularly Ottawa, so we need to be on the ball in order to compete and maintain top-ofmind awareness in this environment.”

St. Laurent Centre has already put significant resources behind its social media efforts. “We researched a lot at the beginning of our social media involvement in 2009, and we decided to focus on content and engagement using a limited number of platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and our own blog,” says Rachkowski. “We spend a lot of time on the content that we post, to keep it relevant to what our followers are interested in. It’s very much integrated into everything we do — advertising, public relations, and special events — and it’s become a fabulous brandbuilding tool for us.”

St. Laurent Centre makes a concerted effort to create engaging content. “Particularly in the retail space, there’s so much reposting that a lot of people are getting bored with what they see on Facebook, because they see the same things posted by multiple sites,” says Rachkowski. “We focus on original content. That’s time-consuming and also represents a money investment in things like photo shoots, but it’s important as we try to create a feel for the uniqueness of the center.”

The marketing department also realized early on that a successful social media strategy was about more than simply promoting the mall itself. “Our social media communications don’t focus just on St. Laurent Centre, they’re also about what’s happening in our city,” she says. “Social media has helped us develop a voice in Ottawa, and we share not just our vision but real-time needs in the community. For example, a few months ago the Ottawa Food Bank was in desperate need of more food donations. They sent out a call via the news and social media, and we made an effort to engage our fans, and the community in general, in bringing this issue to the forefront.”

Given the critical role of social media, Rachkowski is eager for all the information she can get about how it’s consumed and what impact it has. She will use the Source Metrics analytics application for all contests this year, and will continue to analyze the data that’s uncovered. “We’ve started to see information on which offer worked best to get people into the shopping center, and we’ll build up our database so that we can hopefully glean some insight into what drives our customers and fans,” she says. “It’s definitely a tool we’re going to use going forward.”

For More Information On Source Metrics Go To www.sourcemetrics.com